


Conference Day

by mrs_d



Series: Dead Ends [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (sort of), Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Corporate, First Meetings, M/M, Secret Identity, corporate mumbo jumbo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 06:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15768561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrs_d/pseuds/mrs_d
Summary: Steve hated events like these. Everything about them made him nervous, from eating in front of people, to being forced to interact with relative strangers, to spending the whole day under the watchful eyes of his supervisors. And so much of it was corporate nonsense. An opportunity for the bosses to jerk off about how great they were at upholding professional synergy, or some shit.





	Conference Day

**Author's Note:**

> Started in response to a prompt when I was stuck on other stuff. It's been long enough now that I have to face the fact that it will never be finished.

“Steve.”

Steve grunted in the direction he thought the voice was coming from, hoping it would go away.

“Steve,” it said again. “Come on.”

“Bucky,” Steve tried this time. It came out sounding more like “Fuck off,” which— hey, whatever worked.

But it didn’t work. Bucky was nudging Steve’s shoulder now. “Dude, come on. Your alarm’s been going off for almost twenty minutes, you gotta get up.”

Now that he mentioned it, Steve could hear a steady tone beeping, somewhere off to his right. He fumbled one arm out from under the blankets, but he hit Bucky instead.

Bucky hit him right back, smacking his forearm lightly. “Ow,” Steve muttered. “Jerk.”

“How am I the jerk?” Bucky asked with a slight laugh. “Who set their alarm for ass o’clock in the morning on a random Thursday and then didn’t get up?”

“Thursday,” Steve repeated blearily, then it clicked, and he sat bolt upright in bed. “Shit! What time is it?”

“It’s ten to six,” said Bucky, like he was making a point, which of course he was. Steve exhaled, trying to slow his heart rate, and flicked on the lamp on his nightstand while Bucky turned off the alarm.

“Sorry,” Steve told him, blinking in the glare. Bucky didn’t seem to mind the light. “Were you already up?”

“I haven’t gone to bed yet,” Bucky replied, shrugging his bad shoulder like it wasn’t a big deal.

Steve could see right through it. He scowled. “Bucky,” he began.

“Don’t,” Bucky said, and then he almost smiled. “Your face’ll get stuck like that, you know.”

 _Maybe it wouldn’t if you’d actually sleep,_ Steve thought, but he didn’t want to argue, and it was way too early in the morning to get into all the reasons for Bucky’s insomnia.

“Thanks,” he said instead, putting his feet on the floor and trying to shake off his fatigue. “I wasn’t getting up.”

“I noticed,” said Bucky. “Why’d you set your alarm so early anyway? I thought you usually worked afternoons.”

“I have to be there for 8 today,” Steve explained through a yawn.

“Ouch,” Bucky commented. “How come?”

Steve pushed himself off the edge of the mattress — too tempting to slide sideways back onto the pillow — and caught a glimpse of his cowlick in the mirror over his dresser. It made him wince.

“It’s conference day,” he explained as he tried, unsuccessfully, to flatten his hair.

“Conference day?”

“Yeah. The bosses put everybody in a room and make us do teambuilding exercises, workshops, that kind of thing.”

“Sounds like a bunch of corporate bullshit to me,” Bucky remarked.

“More or less,” Steve agreed. “Free food, though.”

“Hey, I guess that’s something,” said Bucky with a chuckle.

Steve nodded and ran a hand down from his hair over his face, feeling the rough drag of stubble along his jaw. “Damn,” he said, more to himself than to Bucky. He was hoping he could get away without shaving this morning.

“I gotta shower,” he added and moved towards the door, essentially shooing Bucky out of the room. “Thanks again for waking me up.”

“Any time,” said Bucky, turning to go down the hall to his own bedroom. “But you’re on your own if you fall asleep in the shower, because I do _not_ want to see that again,” he called over his shoulder.

Steve rolled his eyes. That had happened one time, and there were extenuating circumstances — it was grad school, and Steve was _tired,_ okay? — but Bucky, apparently, wasn’t planning on letting it go any time soon.

“Jerk,” he repeated under his breath, and he closed the bathroom door so he could start getting ready for his day.

* * *

Steve could hear voices — the chatter of a room full of people — in the hall, and he paused to breathe before he walked in. He hated events like these. Everything about them made him nervous, from eating in front of people, to being forced to interact with relative strangers, to spending the whole day under the watchful eyes of his supervisors. And Bucky was right: so much of it was corporate nonsense. An opportunity for the bosses to jerk off about how great they were at upholding professional synergy, or some shit.

A few other people were coming up the hall; Steve couldn’t delay any longer. He smiled and followed them into the conference room, found his nametag at the front desk and claimed a spot at a table with some people from his department before he headed for the food line. The breakfast buffet wasn’t as good as last year, he noticed as he approached. Not that that was the only thing Steve was there for or anything.

In front of him in line, three older women were gossiping about Lori in HR. Steve yawned, a little more pronouncedly than he’d meant to, and they turned and gave him a dirty look. For a second, he considered flipping them off, but he reminded himself it wasn’t worth it. Working at SHIELD was just a day job for him, a steadier way to pay the bills than his art was — not worth the stress that came from caring too much about what these people thought of him.

So he forced another small smile until they went back to their conversation and then rolled his eyes when they weren’t looking. After enduring five more minutes of the thrilling saga of Lori’s extended maternity leave, Steve reached the food. He helped himself to two slices of quiche and a couple of sausages before he poured as much coffee as he could into one of the tiny mugs the caterers had provided. Then he snagged a sugar packet and popped it between his teeth, so he had a free hand to grab a bowl of fruit salad and balance it on the plate with his other food.

“Whoa, can I help you with that?”

Steve looked up to find that the annoying ladies in front of him had been replaced by a gorgeous stranger. He had high cheekbones, a bit of a goatee, and warm brown eyes that were currently narrowed in confusion. Steve hesitated, paralyzed by the fact that he had a pack of sugar in his mouth. At least he couldn’t drool, he thought vaguely.

“I’m good,” Steve said through his teeth, like an idiot. His face was burning red, he was sure of it, and he turned away before the man could offer again.  

He was so distracted that he didn’t realize he’d forgotten to grab a fork until he was more than halfway back to his table. “Dammit,” he said around the sugar package, and he swung backwards—

—right into the gorgeous man who’d just offered to help him.

Steve’s coffee splashed up, a mini wave that hit Steve’s shirt first and then rolled onto the other man’s very broad chest. The bowl of fruit salad that Steve had set so carefully on his plate slid sideways, right off the edge of the plate. Steve winced, anticipating the crash that would silence the room and make everyone stare at him.

But it didn’t come. With a movement that was almost too fast to track, the other man caught the bowl and miraculously didn’t spill a drop of his own coffee doing it.

“Whoa,” said Steve. He let the sugar package fall from his mouth onto the plate in front of him, and the man smiled at him—a quick flash that was over too soon. “Good catch.”

“Thanks,” Gorgeous Guy replied. He looked around a little anxiously, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to them. “You got some coffee, uh—”

He pointed, and Steve looked down. There was a dark splash on his navy blue shirt. “Oh,” he said, and then he shrugged. “It’s okay. Sorry about yours.”

Gorgeous Guy glanced down, too—Steve only came up to the man’s shoulder, so it was hard not to follow his eyes and check out the edge of a very nicely defined pec that the small coffee stain accentuated on the man’s black shirt.

“Good thing I didn’t wear white today,” he said with another smile. He looked like he was going to say something more, but Associate Director Pierce chose that moment to come to the podium and start his opening remarks, so Gorgeous Guy just handed Steve his fruit and nodded before he turned away.

Steve shook himself out of his daze and went to his seat. As soon as he got there he remembered, again, that he didn’t have a fork. But everyone else was sitting and listening, so he settled for using his coffee spoon to eat his quiche and sausage. It was extremely awkward, and he felt his tablemates’ eyes on him, but he ignored them as best he could and focused on his breakfast.

As he pushed the empty plate away, he saw Gorgeous Guy, two tables away, turn his head quickly like he’d been caught looking. There was a trace of humor in his face, and Steve should have felt embarrassed, but instead he was pleased, thinking that maybe he’d made the guy laugh, and that was worth something.

* * *

Associate Director Pierce talked for a long time, long enough that Steve felt his eyelids drooping. The small mug of coffee did nothing to help, and Steve soon found himself looking longingly at the carafe on the buffet table. He seemed to be the only person doing so, however; everyone else was paying rapt attention. Steve tuned back in to hear something about implementing organizational changes based on survey results that Steve vaguely remembered from the last all-staff conference day a year ago. He glanced at the images on the screen — colorful boxes with words in them, arrows guiding one box to another; Steve’s eyes glazed over in seconds.

His head jerked up when everyone in the room began talking. He looked at the screen and found that he’d nodded off and missed hearing the instructions for the first activity. He skimmed the bullet points. It was a pretty standard icebreaker: meet somebody new, tell them stuff. Boring, corporate bullshit.

Steve glanced around the table, but everyone he was seated with was already talking, leaning over the backs of their chairs to introduce themselves to people at other tables. Steve sighed and got to his feet, deciding that he could count a second cup of coffee as a colleague and get well-acquainted with it.

But Gorgeous Guy intercepted him en route — thankfully without a collision this time. “Hi,” he said.

“Oh,” Steve replied. “Hi.”

“Do you want more coffee?” asked the man, and Steve nodded fervently.

“I’m Sam, by the way,” Gorgeous Guy added, as they joined the line for the carafe. “Sam Wilson.”

“Steve Rogers,” Steve said automatically, shaking Gorgeous— Sam’s proffered hand.

“Yeah, I kinda put that together,” said Sam Wilson, with glance down at Steve’s chest.

“Oh,” said Steve again, looking down to hide his flushed cheeks. “Right, the name tag. How come you don’t have one?”

“I registered late,” Sam explained.

“Uh oh,” Steve said sarcastically.

“Not my fault,” said Sam with a chuckle. “I just started at SHIELD three days ago.”

“Wow. And they dragged you right into this?”

“My supervisor insisted,” Sam said, with a look that told Steve that he wasn’t the only one uncomfortable in these kinds of events. Not that he showed it, of course; his smile, when it came, was still bright enough to dim the overhead lights, and his body language was easy, comfortable.

Nothing like Steve. Way out of Steve’s league, in fact.

They reached the coffee, finally, and Steve took a few minutes to stir sugar into the cup this time, rather than risk disaster again. Around the room, their colleagues were standing or sitting in small groups, talking animatedly. Steve yawned again.

“So, Steve Rogers,” said Sam after a moment. “Why don’t you share one accomplishment from the past year that you’re proud of?” he asked, reading word-for-word from the slide projected at the front of the room.

Steve huffed out a laugh. “Not sure if I have anything work-related to share, actually.”

Sam cocked his head. “No? Why not?”

Steve bit his tongue. He shouldn’t have been so honest. Not with somebody who was brand-new to the company. SHIELD had a lot of skeletons in its closet, and Steve knew first-hand how stringent the security procedures were at the beginning. Sam might not stick around; a lot of new hires didn’t last the first three months.

“Just... same old, same old,” Steve said, trying to laugh it off. He wasn’t sure if it worked; Sam watched him with narrowed eyes for a few more seconds, and then he changed the subject.

“We had a lot of events like these at my last job,” he said. “Glad to see they’re just as awkward everywhere else.”

“Pretty much,” Steve agreed. “What’s one accomplishment from the last year that you’re proud of?”

“You mean other than getting hired here?” Sam laughed again. “I don’t know, I guess I’m pretty proud of my degree.”

“Congratulations,” said Steve honestly. “What’d you study?”

Sam told him about his degree in Communications, but his second major was psychology, and, watching him talk, Steve was struck by Sam’s passion, his enthusiasm, his genuine desire to help people. He wondered for a moment how he had ended up here. Somewhat selfishly, Steve hoped he would stay, if only to have a better work friend than Brock Fucking Rumlow.

The few minutes Steve spent talking to Sam flew by, until Associate Director Pierce was back at the podium, calling for everyone to re-take their seats. Sam waved and went back to his table, and Steve went back to his, but every time Steve looked over at him, Sam was looking back.

For once, Steve thought, as Pierce started droning on again, there was something at this conference that he liked more than the food.

**Author's Note:**

> Basic summary, since this won't ever be finished: Sam Wilson is secretly Cap, and he calls on Steve to help him take down corruption in Pierce's operation.


End file.
